Former Old Trafford hero sends message of support to David Moyes after Charlie
Adam's brace sealed a 2-1 win for the home side

Mark Hughes once joked that the true measure of any crisis at Manchester United was when Monday morning brought the start of ‘cracked-badge week’.

It was the moment when Hughes and his Old Trafford team-mates would turn to the back page of whichever tabloid was lying around in the dressing room and see United’s badge split in half for dramatic effect to drive home the sense of turmoil at the club.

Hughes endured more than his share of cracked-badge weeks at United before the tide turned under Alex Ferguson in 1990, but David Moyes and his current group of players are seemingly suffering the same fate on a fortnightly basis.

So far in 2014, United have played eight games and lost five of them. Their recent Premier League sequence – LWLWLW – emphasises the lurches from calm to chaos, with Hughes’s Stoke City deservedly ending the club’s 30-year wait for a league victory against United at the Britannia Stadium.

Moyes complains of bad luck, the worst of his career, but such gripes carry little weight at the elite level of sport. As United slumped to defeat at a windswept Britannia it was the absence of quality and belief in Moyes’s team that was striking.

Clearly, it would be ignoring reality to suggest that Moyes has not contributed to the malaise, but it is also too simplistic to pin all of the blame on the former Everton manager.

Too many of his players are failing to deliver and failing to show why they are Manchester United players and Hughes, a central figure in the club’s rise under Ferguson, suggests they should harness the pressure that comes with the red shirt in a positive sense rather than allow it to become suffocating.

“Obviously, there is huge focus on them,” Hughes said. “But you have to deal with that attention. I used to use that as a motivation.

“From my point of view it was fear of failure. It was like, don’t let anyone have the opportunity to criticise. That was what drove me on and I would suggest it’s what drove a lot of United players on. United have always had that and they have players in their group now who have it.

“There will be pressure, that’s obvious, but it goes with the territory. Don’t forget, this team were champions last year and there hasn’t been too many changes in personnel, only the guy at the top.

“At some point, Sir Alex was going to leave, we all knew that, but when the appointment [Moyes] was made, everyone thought it was absolutely the right one and I’ve not seen anything that changes my mind on that. David is not green behind the gills. He will get it right, I am sure.”

Moyes is probably becoming fed up with managerial rivals offering him support by extolling the virtues of patience following another United defeat. Yes, he will be offered time to put United back on track, but the dreadful nature of the team’s decline is eating into his margin for error and patience may be less forthcoming from the terraces and the boardroom if progress is not evident in the early weeks of next season.

Moyes’s tactics are also deserving of scrutiny, with United seemingly without a Plan B beyond attacking the byline and crossing for the misfiring forwards in the penalty area.

Stoke’s victory, while deserved, owed much to good fortune, however, and the bad luck that Moyes subsequently cursed.

The first goal, a 35-yard Charlie Adam free-kick which beat David de Gea following a heavy deflection off Michael Carrick’s leg, was a low blow for United, who had lost both centre-halves – Jonny Evans and Phil Jones – to injury before half-time.

Robin van Persie’s 47th-minute equaliser from Juan Mata’s pass should have propelled United on to victory, but Adam’s stunning goal five minutes later, a left-foot strike from 20 yards, decided the game.

Even a late surge by United, which saw Asmir Begovic brilliantly push a Wayne Rooney free-kick onto the post and Tom Cleverley blaze over the bar from 10 yards, could not force an equaliser and Moyes, facing up to a failure to qualify for the Champions League, knew where to point the finger for the defeat.

“I’ve never had as bad a run [of luck] as this one,” Moyes said. “I’m a football guy, I know how it works and you take it as it comes, but this has been quite a long, sustained period.

“I don’t rely on luck, I believe you earn your luck by how hard you work on the things you do. You’ve got to earn it yourself, you can’t be relying on referees’ decisions etc, so I would rather try and work a bit harder and hope we get a bit luckier.”